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Camp Sights

Laughing at trash culture while enjoying it frees us from its grasp

By Richard von Busack

The poor and the dumb have been the subject of comedy since Horace; their status as the target of camp humor is of less moment than it would seem from Gareth Cook's article on these pages, which mixes some telling points with some broad generalizations. I sympathize with Cook's aims and conclusions, but I quibble with his omnibus assortment of cultural artifacts, all labeled as camp.

In answering Cook's argument, let's begin with (and dispense with) Quentin Tarantino, whose current influence on the modern movie is so strong that it's believed to be influencing life off screen. The fans who respond to Pulp Fiction and nothing but Pulp Fiction are a serious embarrassment to those of us who like Tarantino and think he's a fine and sometimes profound screenwriter. Quentin Tarantino is not a monster, though he may have created one.

As for the Paki-bashing Letterman, he's currently slipping in the ratings, and it serves him right. Watching Letterman is its own punishment. Frankly, you'd have to be blind not to see how miserable Letterman is, so restless, so bored, so peevish. He'd rather be in his warm bed with a good book, instead of interviewing one famous chimp after another. But does Letterman deserve the mantle of King of Camp more than the Eisenhower era's Steve Allen or the equally ironic Jack Parr? And does a virulently mainstream figure like Letterman deserve to share John Waters' aesthetic?

One explanation for the too-broad use of the term "camp" may be in how the verb camper is translated. It means, as Cook points out, "to pose." So the young college kids chortling over truck driver ballads aren't a vanguard of camp. They are full-fledged, Grade-A, garden-variety posers, as are we all, I suppose, unless we have the guts to kill ourselves for our art.

A real artist, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, made this the motto of his very avant-garde new album, Ray Gun Suitcase: "Elvis people are nicer people than people who laugh at Elvis people." Duly noted. It is poignant, how much Elvis means to some really broke and desperate people; yet that poignancy can dwell side by side with the idea that a vision of fat old diapered Elvis as the reborn deity deserves a horselaugh. Elvis is like an atrocious public monument to a tragic historical event; you can laugh while being moved by the impulse to commemorate.

Similarly, it's possible to admire the principles of a "Mean People Suck" bumper sticker while snickering at the whimpering way in which the principle is expressed. Common courtesy and good manners are in desperately short supply; scarcity and stress has added an edge into everyone's voice and the word "fuck" to everyone's vocabulary. (I blame the service industry for rudeness--so much forced use of "sir" and "ma'am" has made politeness off the clock a filthy chore.)

Mean People Suck, but Nice People Bore, and the troubles of life have to be addressed in some constructive way that will make us all refuse to give up in passive defeat. Ultimately, the educational process is not always going to be free of meanness. I don't consider "niceness" a cardinal virtue in a time of institutionalized conformity.

Saying this sounds like a defense of the talk-radio hatefulness that's been adapted into reactionary politics, of Gingrich's and Dole's debating technique based on getting your opponent so rattled from the sound of your braying that he'll make a logical slip in the vain hope of shutting you up. Popular culture worships shouters; camp--anti-pop-culture--by contrast brings back the sly dig, the innuendo, the raised eyebrow, the double meaning that might some day bring back a less crushing spirit to a public discourse currently ruled by the threat, the sound bite and the language of the TV commercial, always phrased in the imperative: "Get ..." "Feel ... " "Do It."

If television is responsible for national standardization, it also has a range that ought to be acknowledged. There's a difference between the campy Batman and the apparently dead-serious Brady Bunch, between Letterman and Beavis and Butt-head; different intentions and attitudes that are as different as the kind of clothes Cook dismisses as ugly. Television is a vast wasteland, yes, but it's not a featureless wasteland.

Batman, the show usually cited as the epitome of campiness, deserves credit. That particular show is a relic of when TV was wonderful, in the sense that it provided wonders, such as the talking horse Mr. Ed. The bold style and expressionist tones that framed Batman made it rear out of the TV wasteland like a volcano. Think of Neil Hefti's rousing music, the genuinely talented guest stars--Burgess Meredith, George Sanders and Cesar Romero, not to mention the powerfully erotic (and mean) Julie Newmar.

It's curious to hear Beavis and Butt-head described as condescending. It's a startlingly subversive show; if the powers behind MTV didn't know in their hearts that they were selling schlock, Beavis and Butt-head would never have been aired. It's not a TV show--it's a gesture of apology. The moral of Beavis and Butt-head is to turn off MTV, lest you become as stupid as they.

The two--whose only role in life is to watch MTV--are fine critics of the posturing, the "posing," the primping, the sex, all used to sell crappy, derivative, commercially viable music. MTV's function is to pour music down the consumer's throat. The gagging sounds of Beavis and Butt-head are a sound of protest, just as their stupid acceptances of the most elementary sexual lures are an object lesson.

Now, The Brady Bunch ... that's a show against which the gods rage in vain. I considered The Brady Bunch an outrage when I was 9; that it persisted amazes me. Still, I just wish that people who pretend to laugh at that terrible show yet watch it anyway would have the strength to admit that they love it. As Montaigne's motto has it, que sais-je, whadda I know? What do any of us know? Maybe to the right mind the show has profound qualities, speaks to lost ideals, is satirical, rich with subtext.

In obsessing over mass-culture relics, the archetypal twentysomething slackers are searching for a class consciousness. The truth is that there's no difference between a slacker in his apartment with his hostile housemates, two paychecks away from having all of his rave clothes in a shopping cart, and the archetypal redneck in his mortgaged double-wide with the flamingos in front. Both represent the same economic category; only style separates them, and nothing evaporates faster than style.

Any crossing over of styles, no matter how tentative and self-conscious or ostensibly mocking, might be something to celebrate--it represents a smothered longing for communion. And disillusionment is the beginning of wisdom: laughing at media while enjoying it is a way of freeing ourselves from its grasp, just like laughing at thrift-shop finds is a way of laughing at consumer culture.

Still, those imprisoned by rage at plastic insincere culture, the emptiness of TV and disgusting convenience food--like the Gen X wraiths either satirized or celebrated in The Doom Generation--should move on to the next step. The poor may have to eat poisonous fast food because there's no market for a mile and only fast-food chains try to function in a wasteland. The rest of us don't have any excuses. Be a vanguard of intellectual suburban renewal. If the TV set offends you, pluck it out: Turn the bastard off, learn to cook at home, and get a library card.

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